Got HIV? Got a cold you can't shake? These are things to definitely consider. But knee-jerk blanket vaccinations without understanding the future consequences in the universal application is not the correct view to hold... unless you hold the patent.
If you've got HIV it's too late to get a vaccine, because your immune system doesn't work right. At that point, you're praying that as many of the general population have been vaccinated as possible, so you won't get it from them.
The more important point here is that the influenza virus, in specific, already mutates very rapidly. When scientists prepare a vaccine, they do it by making the vaccine tailored to the strain of the virus that they think is most likely to become a pandemic. They can be wrong, and if you get the wrong vaccine you will still come down with the flu. Because of this, I'm still not convinced that mass influenza vaccination campaigns are really all that effective at preventing the spread of the disease.
Not quite. It's included in the tetanus booster. It's called DTAP [medscape.com] for Diptheria, Tetanus, Acellular Pertussis.
Yes, but like I said, in the U.S. you generally have to ask for that specific version. Otherwise they may just assume you want the tetanus-diptheria version, because it's cheaper (and it's believed adults only need the pertussis component once). Your experience might be different, for example if you live in a country with universal healthcare.
Putting out Petri dishes (unvaccinated children) for measles to grow in and spread places those who have been vaccinated at risk, just less risk than if they'd not had the vaccine.
Yeah, but it's much less risk. The way my Infectious Diseases professor explained it was if she had measles, and if she walked to the front of the classroom to begin a lecture, and she broke into a coughing fit, in two weeks' time virtually every student in the class who had not been vaccinated would have measles. It's that infectious, but the vaccine provides considerable immunity.
The other side of it, of course, is that it's hard to get measles this way in 2011 because very few people are "walking Petri dishes" of measles -- because virtually nobody catches it in the first place (because of herd immunity). This may be the most important aspect of mass vaccination programs.
Vaccines also don't last forever. You should all be getting a tetanus booster once every ten years. Tetanus is something you don't need to catch from another person; you can assume it's pretty much everywhere in the environment.
Another one that doesn't last is whooping cough (pertussis). In my region of California there have been a number of outbreaks of whooping cough in the last couple of years, mostly in affluent Marin County where parents think they know better than doctors and have stopped having their kids vaccinated. As a result, doctors now recommend that everyone get a one-time pertussis booster at some point in their adult life. The way to do it, coincidentally, is to ask for it with your next tetanus booster. The idea here is that an adult who contracts whooping cough will probably feel pretty bad, but it won't be life-threatening; still, that adult carrier doesn't want to risk passing the disease on to a child who may not have been vaccinated.
I hope you enjoy your old age, then, because it's gonna suck for you when you break a hip and there's nobody around young enough to lift you off the bathroom floor.
But one of the reasons (but not the only reason) why people in poor parts of the world have so many children is because they still have a high mortality rate from preventable disease. In the rich world, where people rarely die from childhood diseases, we see birth rates declining.
Well let me educate you, then. (I am a former InfoWorld senior editor and still a regular contributor.)
The way IDG is organized is that each of its brands is operated more or less as an independent company. They all share certain resources (real estate, printing presses, accounting department, IT, health plan, etc., and there's even a policy of extensive content-sharing), but in a sense each of the brands "competes" with the others, just as they compete with magazines from other publishers. There is a general attitude of collegiality between the publications, but each group plans its own coverage independently and they seldom share their plans with the other groups until after the content is published.
The editorial department of each publication reports to IDG corporate but the only real expectation is that they make a profit (or, if they're not making one now, that they have a good and workable plan to make one in the near future). There is no "IDG editorial czar" whose job it is to tell the publications to print more pro-Microsoft stories, or anti-Microsoft stories for that matter. In fact, when it comes right down to it, if ComputerWorld came out as a predominantly pro-Microsoft publication, it would make a certain amount of sense for NetworkWorld to go the opposite direction, just in the interest of differentiating itself.
One thing you may not realize, also, is that IDG is a privately held company. That means it does not have the same pressure to "increase shareholder value" that some of its competitors have, and therefore its publications' editorial departments are somewhat insulated from some of the more insidious consequences of being a publicly traded company. Also, while occasionally some of IDG's brands may struggle and start to lose money (JavaWorld comes to mind), because of the way the overall company is structured, it seldom makes sense to just retire one specific brand. They will probably struggle on in one form or another until someone comes along with a strong enough editorial vision to justify investing some money in a relaunch.
Also, put out of your mind the idea that IDG publications (or any publications in this industry that I'm aware of) accept money from advertisers in exchange for news coverage. It simply doesn't happen -- both because the editorial departments of these publications are typically ethical professionals, but also because print publications are required to maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If the number of pages that were paid for by advertisers exceeds this ratio, the publisher can lose its qualification for second class postage when shipping its magazines, which would cost it a huge amount of money and potentially get it into other types of trouble, including but not limited to ruining its reputation among industry people who really know what they're talking about (as opposed to rumor-mongers).
And, in closing, don't confuse IDG with IDC. Both are owned by the same parent company, but IDC (the market research company) is independent from the magazine publishing wing and the two do not have a particularly close working relationship; that is, if I want a quote from an IDC analyst in my IDG publication, I have to call them up and ask for one, same as anybody. Nobody from IDC comes to IDG editorial meetings and IDG editorial is not involved in producing IDC research.
Please try again. If you believe your account might have been locked out, please call 888-999-2222 for assistance.
Of course, then you open the system to social engineering, even by strangers who don't have access to the company phone book -- and as we've seen time and again, humans are often a lot easier to hack than machines.
The story was submitted by IDG (itwbennett), one of the biggest Microsoft shills on the net.
Really? IDG, which publishes a number of different brands including MacWorld, JavaWorld, and LinuxWorld, is "one of the biggest Microsoft shills on the net"? I wonder what they'd have to do, in your mind, to only qualify as one of the smaller shills.
For some unknown reason, while I was reading your post all I could think of was Waldorf and Statler's song from the opening of The Muppet Show. Strange.
I said you would be "hard pressed" to find a service you could use effectively and a BBS would not be effective. You are too dependent on in bound lines; at best you could provide communication to perhaps a handful of users at any given time.
Given that the alternative is for nobody to know what's going on in any part of the country at any given time, I'd say that's effective enough. Remember that not just Internet routers but entire mobile networks have been knocked down by the Egyptian government. I don't know for sure, but I'll wager Egypt is one of those countries where more people have mobile phones than landlines. Whatever uses those few landlines to best result is effective. The earlier poster was talking about acoustically coupled modems -- if you're resorting to that, a BBS system to spread news and information is cake.
But all of the things you've mentioned are still produced and are still in use. Many pilot's watches come with built-in slide rules. I don't know of any mechanical tool that can help you do longhand square roots, but the math certainly isn't forgotten. You can still buy a wide range of minidisc players, recorders, and discs, brand-new on Amazon. There are plenty of zoetropes around in museums or used as novelties, and children make them out of paper for fun. I'm not sure cuneiform counts as a tool in this sense, but even if it should, it's not as forgotten as some other languages whose last speakers have died.
At those speeds you'd be hard pressed to find a service you could use effectively.
Nonsense. There are plenty of us on here who dialed in to BBSes at those speeds every day for years. Nothing's stopping anyone in Egypt from setting up a BBS today.
Whatever. And if you've never picked up a paintbrush and created an oil painting in Renaissance Florence, then you know absolutely nothing about the Mona Lisa. I mean, that's a fact that should be obvious to anybody, right? How could you know anything about it? Just watch TV, it's what you understand.
Android != "Android Powered by Google" which is what every phone and tablet ships with. Android is technically open source but the vast majority is Google's build and app suite which includes non-open-source code.
That's not really true; I read about at least one Android phone (from Samsung?) where the default search provider was Bing. Each phone maker also has its own custom "skin" that adds a bunch of functionality on top of stock Android. Other than Google's Nexus phones, almost nobody uses a stock "powered by Google" build. Mine has messaging and contact management software written by Motorola, for example. It syncs Gmail contacts, but it does so through Motorola's own online services.
Multiverse theories don't turn me on anymore. Perhaps it's because of 9/11 and all its bloody consequences, especially the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, I have two teenage kids, and I'm worried about the enormous problems they're inheriting from my generation. Not only wars overseas but also global warming, species extinction, pollution, poverty, pandemics and so on.
In other words, Greene's interest in string theory and the multiverse is (again, a quote) "immoral," because people are starving, we're fighting the war on terror, and blah blah blah. Therefore this journalist can manufacture false outrage, going so far as to describe aspects of multiverse theory as "loathesome," because.... again, I'm lost. Then the summary follows suit by describing Greene's book as "propaganda," as if he has some political position to push. He simply doesn't, and it's irrational, creepy, Fahrenheit 451-ish nonsense to pretend otherwise.
It's not so much that he's unqualified as much as it is that he writes these books on string theory and multiverses as if they were 100% accepted fact... To Greene's credit, I saw his interview on the Colbert Report and he did stress once or twice that he was writing about the "theory" and now it was up to science to do experiments and check it.
People want to know what they're doing, because they've been told that we're Just Around The Corner from The Big Answers. It's a lie, and essentially everybody familiar enough with the work knows it.
Jesus, paranoid much? The public is intellectually curious because they're being lied to. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have some ideas about how the universe might be organized but they're liars! They're lying to you! Don't listen! LA LA LA LA LA LA!
Settle the fuck down. Brian Greene wrote a book in which he tries to explain some modern avenues of conjecture about physics in a way that you don't need to know "a lot of very, very difficult calculus" to understand. Period. Sorry if that cost you your funding, or whatever you've got your panties in a wad about, but you're sounding like a serious ass right now.
Why all the negative spin in the summary? As far as I can tell, nobody is accusing Greene of "propaganda." Rather, this is/. propagandizing at its absolute worst.
Why call Greene a "pop physicist"? That seems to imply he's not qualified in his field, when one of the articles referenced calls him "a physicist at Columbia University" who is "is an immensely talented science explicator." It describes his other books as "smart, witty bestsellers."
TFA says Greene "draws ire from physicists," then goes on to explain that a journalist from Scientific American has written an editorial, and another blog agrees. Where are the physicists? I can't read the article from Nature, but just the abstract calls Greene's book "beguiling."
TFA goes on to accuse Greene of being "a cheerleader" for multiverse theory, a stance that puts him in the same camp, it says, as other notable physics propagandists.... such as Stephen Hawking. Whoah, hanging out in some bad company there.
Here's the real summary: Brian Greene has written on string theory for a popular audience in the past, and he's also fascinated by some of the more fringe-y elements of physics, such as the multiverse theory. He has a new book out. He has not taken any public stance on the Tea Party, abortion, or the Iraq war -- and honestly, I think it's sad that it seems to have become a requirement of modern journalism to pretend that he has.
Yeah, my mom's husband bought a Verizon router for Christmas so they could have Internet wherever they went in their RV. So far so good. But part of his plan was that they wouldn't need their cable Internet at home anymore because they had the Verizon thing. It's very difficult to explain why this is not a great idea when all the carriers are free to advertise how fast and reliable and unlimited their services are.
This was at the Qatar Motor Show. According to Wikipedia, the United Arab Emirates switched to liters for their standard unit of fuel measurement in 2010, but they used imperial gallons before that. Qatar is not in the UAE but I figure it's close enough. 261 imperial gallons is 313 gallons.
I love some Japanese artists (Katsuhiro Otomo and Go Nagai come to mind) and some of the stories I've read. But I could just as easily argue that most anime (where the characters spend half the time staring grimly and not moving while the camera dollies back and melodramatic music plays, but nothing ever really happens) and manga (complete with its obsessions with teen romance, robots, high school romance, kung fu, military romance, vampires, tennis court romance, etc.) have so battered my brain into stunned boredom that I could never possibly "get into" the genre. To each his own. (Actually, my thing is more Franco-Belgian comics these days.)
My brother in law is black and grew up in a welfare family - funny thing is, he can speak English as well as anyone else can.
I'm glad you have black friends. Ask him about "code switching." He knows what it means.
That said, the fact that some people have equal access to education does not mean that all do. And therefore your contention that "Ebonics" -- an effort to obtain access to ESL funds for underrepresented, underprivileged black students -- proves that blacks are lazy and ignorant has not been proven.
Bing was the first product that got google by surprise and they had to catch-up to it.
So Bing is outflanking Google, huh? If you discount all the places where Microsoft has made Bing the default search engine, or has paid one of its partners to, I think you'd see a different picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Got HIV? Got a cold you can't shake? These are things to definitely consider. But knee-jerk blanket vaccinations without understanding the future consequences in the universal application is not the correct view to hold... unless you hold the patent.
If you've got HIV it's too late to get a vaccine, because your immune system doesn't work right. At that point, you're praying that as many of the general population have been vaccinated as possible, so you won't get it from them.
The more important point here is that the influenza virus, in specific, already mutates very rapidly. When scientists prepare a vaccine, they do it by making the vaccine tailored to the strain of the virus that they think is most likely to become a pandemic. They can be wrong, and if you get the wrong vaccine you will still come down with the flu. Because of this, I'm still not convinced that mass influenza vaccination campaigns are really all that effective at preventing the spread of the disease.
Not quite. It's included in the tetanus booster. It's called DTAP [medscape.com] for Diptheria, Tetanus, Acellular Pertussis.
Yes, but like I said, in the U.S. you generally have to ask for that specific version. Otherwise they may just assume you want the tetanus-diptheria version, because it's cheaper (and it's believed adults only need the pertussis component once). Your experience might be different, for example if you live in a country with universal healthcare.
Putting out Petri dishes (unvaccinated children) for measles to grow in and spread places those who have been vaccinated at risk, just less risk than if they'd not had the vaccine.
Yeah, but it's much less risk. The way my Infectious Diseases professor explained it was if she had measles, and if she walked to the front of the classroom to begin a lecture, and she broke into a coughing fit, in two weeks' time virtually every student in the class who had not been vaccinated would have measles. It's that infectious, but the vaccine provides considerable immunity.
The other side of it, of course, is that it's hard to get measles this way in 2011 because very few people are "walking Petri dishes" of measles -- because virtually nobody catches it in the first place (because of herd immunity). This may be the most important aspect of mass vaccination programs.
Vaccines also don't last forever. You should all be getting a tetanus booster once every ten years. Tetanus is something you don't need to catch from another person; you can assume it's pretty much everywhere in the environment.
Another one that doesn't last is whooping cough (pertussis). In my region of California there have been a number of outbreaks of whooping cough in the last couple of years, mostly in affluent Marin County where parents think they know better than doctors and have stopped having their kids vaccinated. As a result, doctors now recommend that everyone get a one-time pertussis booster at some point in their adult life. The way to do it, coincidentally, is to ask for it with your next tetanus booster. The idea here is that an adult who contracts whooping cough will probably feel pretty bad, but it won't be life-threatening; still, that adult carrier doesn't want to risk passing the disease on to a child who may not have been vaccinated.
I hope you enjoy your old age, then, because it's gonna suck for you when you break a hip and there's nobody around young enough to lift you off the bathroom floor.
But one of the reasons (but not the only reason) why people in poor parts of the world have so many children is because they still have a high mortality rate from preventable disease. In the rich world, where people rarely die from childhood diseases, we see birth rates declining.
Well let me educate you, then. (I am a former InfoWorld senior editor and still a regular contributor.)
The way IDG is organized is that each of its brands is operated more or less as an independent company. They all share certain resources (real estate, printing presses, accounting department, IT, health plan, etc., and there's even a policy of extensive content-sharing), but in a sense each of the brands "competes" with the others, just as they compete with magazines from other publishers. There is a general attitude of collegiality between the publications, but each group plans its own coverage independently and they seldom share their plans with the other groups until after the content is published.
The editorial department of each publication reports to IDG corporate but the only real expectation is that they make a profit (or, if they're not making one now, that they have a good and workable plan to make one in the near future). There is no "IDG editorial czar" whose job it is to tell the publications to print more pro-Microsoft stories, or anti-Microsoft stories for that matter. In fact, when it comes right down to it, if ComputerWorld came out as a predominantly pro-Microsoft publication, it would make a certain amount of sense for NetworkWorld to go the opposite direction, just in the interest of differentiating itself.
One thing you may not realize, also, is that IDG is a privately held company. That means it does not have the same pressure to "increase shareholder value" that some of its competitors have, and therefore its publications' editorial departments are somewhat insulated from some of the more insidious consequences of being a publicly traded company. Also, while occasionally some of IDG's brands may struggle and start to lose money (JavaWorld comes to mind), because of the way the overall company is structured, it seldom makes sense to just retire one specific brand. They will probably struggle on in one form or another until someone comes along with a strong enough editorial vision to justify investing some money in a relaunch.
Also, put out of your mind the idea that IDG publications (or any publications in this industry that I'm aware of) accept money from advertisers in exchange for news coverage. It simply doesn't happen -- both because the editorial departments of these publications are typically ethical professionals, but also because print publications are required to maintain a certain ratio of advertising to editorial pages. If the number of pages that were paid for by advertisers exceeds this ratio, the publisher can lose its qualification for second class postage when shipping its magazines, which would cost it a huge amount of money and potentially get it into other types of trouble, including but not limited to ruining its reputation among industry people who really know what they're talking about (as opposed to rumor-mongers).
And, in closing, don't confuse IDG with IDC. Both are owned by the same parent company, but IDC (the market research company) is independent from the magazine publishing wing and the two do not have a particularly close working relationship; that is, if I want a quote from an IDC analyst in my IDG publication, I have to call them up and ask for one, same as anybody. Nobody from IDC comes to IDG editorial meetings and IDG editorial is not involved in producing IDC research.
Please try again. If you believe your account might have been locked out, please call 888-999-2222 for assistance.
Of course, then you open the system to social engineering, even by strangers who don't have access to the company phone book -- and as we've seen time and again, humans are often a lot easier to hack than machines.
The story was submitted by IDG (itwbennett), one of the biggest Microsoft shills on the net.
Really? IDG, which publishes a number of different brands including MacWorld, JavaWorld, and LinuxWorld, is "one of the biggest Microsoft shills on the net"? I wonder what they'd have to do, in your mind, to only qualify as one of the smaller shills.
For some unknown reason, all I could think of while reading your post was Waldorf and Statler's song from the opening of The Muppet Show. Strange.
For some unknown reason, while I was reading your post all I could think of was Waldorf and Statler's song from the opening of The Muppet Show. Strange.
I said you would be "hard pressed" to find a service you could use effectively and a BBS would not be effective. You are too dependent on in bound lines; at best you could provide communication to perhaps a handful of users at any given time.
Given that the alternative is for nobody to know what's going on in any part of the country at any given time, I'd say that's effective enough. Remember that not just Internet routers but entire mobile networks have been knocked down by the Egyptian government. I don't know for sure, but I'll wager Egypt is one of those countries where more people have mobile phones than landlines. Whatever uses those few landlines to best result is effective. The earlier poster was talking about acoustically coupled modems -- if you're resorting to that, a BBS system to spread news and information is cake.
But all of the things you've mentioned are still produced and are still in use. Many pilot's watches come with built-in slide rules. I don't know of any mechanical tool that can help you do longhand square roots, but the math certainly isn't forgotten. You can still buy a wide range of minidisc players, recorders, and discs, brand-new on Amazon. There are plenty of zoetropes around in museums or used as novelties, and children make them out of paper for fun. I'm not sure cuneiform counts as a tool in this sense, but even if it should, it's not as forgotten as some other languages whose last speakers have died.
At those speeds you'd be hard pressed to find a service you could use effectively.
Nonsense. There are plenty of us on here who dialed in to BBSes at those speeds every day for years. Nothing's stopping anyone in Egypt from setting up a BBS today.
Whatever. And if you've never picked up a paintbrush and created an oil painting in Renaissance Florence, then you know absolutely nothing about the Mona Lisa. I mean, that's a fact that should be obvious to anybody, right? How could you know anything about it? Just watch TV, it's what you understand.
Android != "Android Powered by Google" which is what every phone and tablet ships with. Android is technically open source but the vast majority is Google's build and app suite which includes non-open-source code.
That's not really true; I read about at least one Android phone (from Samsung?) where the default search provider was Bing. Each phone maker also has its own custom "skin" that adds a bunch of functionality on top of stock Android. Other than Google's Nexus phones, almost nobody uses a stock "powered by Google" build. Mine has messaging and contact management software written by Motorola, for example. It syncs Gmail contacts, but it does so through Motorola's own online services.
Did you read TFA?
Multiverse theories don't turn me on anymore. Perhaps it's because of 9/11 and all its bloody consequences, especially the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, I have two teenage kids, and I'm worried about the enormous problems they're inheriting from my generation. Not only wars overseas but also global warming, species extinction, pollution, poverty, pandemics and so on.
In other words, Greene's interest in string theory and the multiverse is (again, a quote) "immoral," because people are starving, we're fighting the war on terror, and blah blah blah. Therefore this journalist can manufacture false outrage, going so far as to describe aspects of multiverse theory as "loathesome," because .... again, I'm lost. Then the summary follows suit by describing Greene's book as "propaganda," as if he has some political position to push. He simply doesn't, and it's irrational, creepy, Fahrenheit 451-ish nonsense to pretend otherwise.
It's not so much that he's unqualified as much as it is that he writes these books on string theory and multiverses as if they were 100% accepted fact ...
To Greene's credit, I saw his interview on the Colbert Report and he did stress once or twice that he was writing about the "theory" and now it was up to science to do experiments and check it.
So? Make up your mind.
People want to know what they're doing, because they've been told that we're Just Around The Corner from The Big Answers. It's a lie, and essentially everybody familiar enough with the work knows it.
Jesus, paranoid much? The public is intellectually curious because they're being lied to. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have some ideas about how the universe might be organized but they're liars! They're lying to you! Don't listen! LA LA LA LA LA LA!
Settle the fuck down. Brian Greene wrote a book in which he tries to explain some modern avenues of conjecture about physics in a way that you don't need to know "a lot of very, very difficult calculus" to understand. Period. Sorry if that cost you your funding, or whatever you've got your panties in a wad about, but you're sounding like a serious ass right now.
Why all the negative spin in the summary? As far as I can tell, nobody is accusing Greene of "propaganda." Rather, this is /. propagandizing at its absolute worst.
Here's the real summary: Brian Greene has written on string theory for a popular audience in the past, and he's also fascinated by some of the more fringe-y elements of physics, such as the multiverse theory. He has a new book out. He has not taken any public stance on the Tea Party, abortion, or the Iraq war -- and honestly, I think it's sad that it seems to have become a requirement of modern journalism to pretend that he has.
Yeah, my mom's husband bought a Verizon router for Christmas so they could have Internet wherever they went in their RV. So far so good. But part of his plan was that they wouldn't need their cable Internet at home anymore because they had the Verizon thing. It's very difficult to explain why this is not a great idea when all the carriers are free to advertise how fast and reliable and unlimited their services are.
+1 Insightful
This was at the Qatar Motor Show. According to Wikipedia, the United Arab Emirates switched to liters for their standard unit of fuel measurement in 2010, but they used imperial gallons before that. Qatar is not in the UAE but I figure it's close enough. 261 imperial gallons is 313 gallons.
I love some Japanese artists (Katsuhiro Otomo and Go Nagai come to mind) and some of the stories I've read. But I could just as easily argue that most anime (where the characters spend half the time staring grimly and not moving while the camera dollies back and melodramatic music plays, but nothing ever really happens) and manga (complete with its obsessions with teen romance, robots, high school romance, kung fu, military romance, vampires, tennis court romance, etc.) have so battered my brain into stunned boredom that I could never possibly "get into" the genre. To each his own. (Actually, my thing is more Franco-Belgian comics these days.)
My brother in law is black and grew up in a welfare family - funny thing is, he can speak English as well as anyone else can.
I'm glad you have black friends. Ask him about "code switching." He knows what it means.
That said, the fact that some people have equal access to education does not mean that all do. And therefore your contention that "Ebonics" -- an effort to obtain access to ESL funds for underrepresented, underprivileged black students -- proves that blacks are lazy and ignorant has not been proven.
You are a racist. Search yourself and grow.
Bing was the first product that got google by surprise and they had to catch-up to it.
So Bing is outflanking Google, huh? If you discount all the places where Microsoft has made Bing the default search engine, or has paid one of its partners to, I think you'd see a different picture.